A foray into the heart of social nerdiness

Murder, Most Foul: Part the Seventh

The information the party has gathered all points to Rose as being amazingly suspicious. So, in true adventurer fashion, they decide to head to the bar.

At the Bar!

When they arrive at the bar, Rose and Jilad are nowhere to be found. Chuck is behind the counter, humming to himself. The rest of the party is sitting in a corner, trying to gather information from the townsfolk. Plague is still helping out, serving drinks and getting things from the kitchen. Chuck is at the counter, humming to himself. He is doodling on some scrap paper in between filling drink orders. The party decides to talk to Chuck first. Chuck looks up, and smiles at the party. Pentaros looks down and sees that Chuck is crudely drawing a woman. When pressed, Chuck mentions that it’s the woman in red who visits him at night, asking how he is doing. The party kind of looks at each other, confused. When asked further, Chuck can’t really offer too much more information, other than the woman is very pretty, and she said she’d be going away soon. Sensing this is a dead end, Indiriana asks where Rose or Jilad are. Chuck seems confused, since Rose and Plague went into the kitchen together, and Rose hasn’t come out since. This was about an hour ago. The party enters the kitchen, to find Plague there, alone. There are no other exits that the party can see. The party, sensing this is a plot point that something very wrong was going on, indeed, decide to restrain Plague. No sooner than they get the ropes out, Plague disappears, leaving the party to wonder WTF is going on.

Not knowing what else to do, Israfel decides to hide under Chuck’s bed to see if he can meet this mysterious woman in red. Somehow managing not to fail his boredom rolls, Israfel does meet the woman in red, but only to see her vanish before his eyes. The rest of the party heads to Jilad’s place, hoping for some answers.

A Rush of Answers

At this point, I was going to be unavailable to DM for a month, so I kind of had to rush all the answers together. Yeah, my bad. The party faces their biggest challenge yet: The Info Dump. When the party reaches the hut, they see Jilad there, alone. Jilad assures them that Plague is unharmed. He then proceeds to talk for a solid five minutes. The story, in short, is that the Sheriff and Ren raped and beat the real Rose badly, leaving her brain damaged and preggers. The witch woman, Shirley, did nothing to help after the fact. As an act of vengence, Jilad summoned a succubus to impersonate Rose and kill the sheriff and author. She killed the sheriff with her bare hands, and then covered her tracks with blood from Ren’s slaughtered pig. She then compelled the witch woman to stab herself in the eyes while Shirley was in a trance. Finally, while Ren was in a drunken stupor, grieving over his lost pig, “Rose” used her compulsion to convince him to kill himself. However, even a succubus can feel guilt at times, so she checked in on Chuck to make sure he was doing all right.

The party was kind of at a loss for a moment, but Cedrick, the paladin, really came through at this moment. We didn’t really have time for a fight, so he came up with the best solution possible. Best of all, it was all something that Cedrick would have said. In short, since Cedrick knew that they’d be unable to actually kill the succubus (a little bit of the overly-helpful DM threw in), he devised a plan that would let everybody ‘out.’ Jilad than shape-shifted back to “Rose” and opened up a trap door hidden under the rug. Plague, Jilad, the real Rose and her child are all safe and sound, chatting amongst themselves.

RESOLUTION!!

Rose goes back to the bar to attend to her business. The party waits until nightfall, when Cedrick comes bursting in, yelling something about “infernal hellspawn” and “being of darkness.” She angrily transforms into a scary generic demon form, and screams. With that, he rushes her, and stabs her with his sword. She vanishes, the mayor awards the party a good amount of gold, and Rose and Jilad head off somewhere to start a new life. A happy ending, all contrived because we managed to cram 3 hours of adventuring into about 45 minutes. Woooo!

I’ll do a run down of what worked and what didn’t next time. I learned a lot from this campaign, and I really did have a lot of fun building it. Cheers.